This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below at the end of the specification but prior to the claims.
Relevant to these teachings, smartphones may be characterized as having certain applications that run in background, for example email, social networking, RSS feeds and the like. Sometimes these background applications are downloading actual data such as an incoming email, while at other times they generate just status update, poll, or similar messages. An application requiring an internet connection may also try to maintain a network address translation (NAT) function running in the network side by sending keep-alive packets at intervals frequent enough to keep the network from closing the NAT connection for lack of use. That is, these keep-alive packets may be sent to the application server just to keep the application alive and running in the background. Traffic for such background applications has quite different characteristics than a traditional voice call.
Heterogeneous network (HetNet) operation was introduced in 3GPP Release 10, and later releases have included enhancements. There have been and are still ongoing activities in 3GPP specifying optimization features for smart (and other) phones in different network scenarios (like small cells or HetNet scenarios). Latency, throughput and UE power consumption (e.g., actual operation time of the mobile terminal/device) are metrics to assure a good user experience. These relate to the mobility management which helps assure the UE is connected to the most suitable cell with regard to the above parameters. Often the end user experience is determined by the network and is likely to differ in HetNet scenarios in future deployments of E-UTRAN, where being connected to the correct cell in the correct/most optimal manner is expected to be more critical. The most correct cell may depend on the traffic characteristics, so it is helpful to have information about the current mobility status of the user equipment. Also it is known that UE mobility is one of the factors for the network to use to set UE individual connection release timer values.